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Ep. 3 - Thunder and Lightning with Charles Lawrence
223 Plays1 year ago
Once upon a time, a scientist and an artist came together to open magical, wondrous portals into the underworld, and now they want you to come explore the labyrinth along with them!
In this episode of "Midnight Water: Dialogues in the Labyrinth", Katherine MacLean and Eileen Hall are in conversation with their dear friend Charles Lawrence. The list of Charlie's lifetime adventures is long and surprising, but the most important thing for you to know is that he has survived being struck by lightning more than once! Enjoy your deep dive into his magical and fun world.
The Scientist: Katherine MacLean ~ www.katherinemaclean.org
The Artist: Eileen Hall ~ www.eileen-hall.com
The Music: Kate Fleur-Young ~ www.katefleuryoung.com
Podcast Editor: Josh Leonard
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Transcript
Introduction to "Dialogues in the Labyrinth"
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dialogues in the Labyrinth, a series of mind-expanding conversations inspired by my new book, Midnight Water, a Psychedelic Memoir. I'm Catherine McLean, former research scientist, mother of two young children, lover of adventure, and now a high school math teacher, because you never know what's coming next.
00:00:56
Speaker
And my dear friend and artist Eileen Hall did the cover art for Midnight Water and is also a main character in the book. We've had many adventures together over the last 10 years and we decided to share some of our experiences and things that we've learned over that period of time together.
Introduction to Charles Lawrence
00:01:16
Speaker
and use it as a platform to jump off and play within these labyrinths and mazes and territories of the mind and heart together.
00:01:28
Speaker
So join us again for our third episode. You've heard from myself, Catherine, and now Eileen. And this is today our first guest who is neither of the two of us. So we are going to see what happens when you add a totally new variable into the mix. We have our dear friend, Charles Lawrence.
00:01:47
Speaker
who I have taken already a few adventures with. I hope there are many more. Charles has been all over the world. He's had a fascinating life and he is a true wise elder in a world where we have forgotten what a wise elder is and why they are so important.
00:02:05
Speaker
And so I hope that if you yourself have never experienced this perspective that today is illuminating, rejuvenating, and maybe something else that you get to decide. So Charles will help us set the stage for our conversation and where you might end up at the end. Charles, welcome.
00:02:27
Speaker
Thank you. Great pleasure to be here and I show up with great anticipation because I'll learn myself from the dialogue we have. Done. So, how would you like to launch into this? What's our threshold place?
00:02:44
Speaker
Something that really stands out for me when we first were together, it feels like yesterday, but it was the beginning of the summer. My book had just come out and the world did not know much about midnight water. And you asked me before a ceremony that we did in Bermuda, how do you want to feel at the end of this ceremony? And
00:03:07
Speaker
You know, I played along. I said, oh, this is Charles doing one of his games. This is just a lighthearted thing. But it worked. And it took me through the entire summer, months of my life with that same feeling that was generated in a very short period of time with intention. So I wonder if you could help the listeners get into that kind of space and understand how they are participating in our dialogue together.
Charles's Journey of Self-Discovery
00:03:34
Speaker
In my own journey,
00:03:36
Speaker
I came to recognize that, number one, I had been misidentified from birth on. Number two, I had a destiny that I was totally unconscious of. I didn't know even things about destiny. My culture, my background had not taught me of that.
00:04:05
Speaker
There came a moment in my journey when I was about around 40 years old when the doors of perception, the so-called doors of perception of consciousness expanded. And I found myself a stranger to strange land, territory that was beyond my concept at that time.
00:04:27
Speaker
And as my beloved teacher, friend, guide Joseph Campbell addressed at one point when I was sharing with Joe these things that had been happening, and he spoke of a destiny, having had a destiny. And one of his comments was that if you have a destiny, you best go gracefully or you'll be dragged by your heels.
00:04:56
Speaker
And my response to Joe as these doors kept opening, and I found people, elders waiting for me to show up, that
00:05:08
Speaker
I was so undereducated, so unconscious, still so at the affect of a mindset that I had accepted as a child and from on that was subjected, needed to be subjected to total rearranging of the mind.
00:05:27
Speaker
because I was kicked out, so to speak. Well, Rumi talks about going out beyond these ideas of wrongdoing and right doing. And there's a whole other field, maybe many levels of realms of awareness waiting for the individual who shows up.
Cultural Wisdom and Learning from Elders
00:05:47
Speaker
That's one way to say that, Catherine. And
00:05:56
Speaker
The experience of these decades of, and it was through experience, that this rearrangement of consciousness happened, also being reflected by wise people, knowledgeable people, people of other cultures,
00:06:15
Speaker
There was no one in my culture that could reflect to me what other cultures gave me, whether it's the Mayan culture of Guatemala, or of the Dagan people of Africa, or of a Sangoma in South Africa, or of a Keros in the Andes, a Shaman in the jungle,
00:06:41
Speaker
and then finally the Hopi who baptized me and gave me their name because they had watched me for decades to see what it was that was hidden within me and why was I sent there? What was I meant to fulfill?
00:06:59
Speaker
And in my dialogue recently, in my last journey to Finland, there is a difference between being a chosen one and one who is a seeker, one who is set rather than one who has come seeking something. And all these different experiences awoke me to a radically different perception of existence.
00:07:29
Speaker
And I recall the first moment we met in that apartment in New York City. There was a heart connection. It was just so clear. And you have little ray in your arms at that time that night, what happened in that ceremony when I just, I knew to give you my drum, my treasured over a hundred year old drum.
00:07:51
Speaker
It's just the knowing, the connection between us, I feel is joy, very profound connection. And then for me comes this issue of how do I, how do we truly support the next steps of another?
Desires and Consciousness
00:08:15
Speaker
And I had begun to learn and
00:08:18
Speaker
again, the rearranging of my mind to understand that unless I rearrange consciousness, I'm going to persist in just living out versions of what I've lived before. And then learning that skill of desire. I've had desires just well up in me that I didn't understand before.
00:08:47
Speaker
unfamiliar, and now I've become familiar that there's a level of, I'm going to call it part of my intuitive channel, but the universe itself is wanting or inspiring me to imagine something greater, something more beyond, and then learning that tool of looking to the future.
00:09:17
Speaker
Now, the future for this event with us right now today, I pre-determined a couple of hours ago that when this conversation is over and we've unplugged, I already know how I desire to feel, which is more than satisfied, fulfilled, delighted, and that I have also been given
00:09:45
Speaker
received from the two of you, information, nourishment in some level, and a learning from the Lakota people that I will take as my requirement to invest attention in the silence when we've clicked off to find out how I've been enhanced, what had really been awakened further in me.
00:10:13
Speaker
as this one teaching is, that if you think you are the same as you were before the conversation or the engagement began, then you were not there for what did happen.
00:10:26
Speaker
And life is, to me, a constant expansion, movement, inversion, extrovertible, extroversion of what it is at once. What is life wanting to happen right now with us? To take us all beyond. And you witness what happened that day in Bermuda. People showing up didn't know why.
00:10:51
Speaker
Quite a few didn't show up knowing why. Quite a few showed up and had never sat in a circle before. I know. All of these Westerners had never even sat in a circle with people together. They'd sat in lines, in rows, at desks, maybe in tiny little groups, but they'd never sat in that circular formation and able to witness each other across that space. Right. Right.
00:11:21
Speaker
What I'm seeing in my mind's eye is the illumination of vibrancy that those people carried. They came in differently and they walked out and they now have a new story they're carrying because they were activated. Something woke up in them.
00:11:39
Speaker
The thing that I love the most, Charles, too, is that you and I love
Interconnectedness and Indra's Net
00:11:44
Speaker
to encourage people to become active participants in their life. They are not receiving. They are not getting, as you like to say, they are not being fixed. They are not being healed by something outside of them. They are being engaged in an active participation toward something. You know, they are creating something. And Eileen, I also know
00:12:06
Speaker
As an artist, she's engaging people to inspire and awaken that kind of creativity in their own life. It's not just, oh, that's a nice painting. Let me put it up on my wall. She's inviting you into a dialogue around, what does this painting make you want to do?
00:12:24
Speaker
Just add to that. A lot of my work is about the luminosity of awareness that happens in the relational web between us and the world, or us and people. As soon as those doors open, it's like this luminous space because you feel the mystery pouring through each of those pores of connection.
00:12:45
Speaker
And that, to me, is endlessly fascinating in the way that we've been built to become aware of that and to also evolve through those various doors of perception, as you're calling them. Right. What flashes to mind right away is that image of Indra's net.
00:13:06
Speaker
And this giant web, now the native people, the Hopi have a, well, not similar, but a sense of a great spider, a ktomi, weaving this web of life. And they talk about it in the old tradition of Vishnu, who was the great creator, dreaming creation,
00:13:28
Speaker
And every 5,000 years Vishnu wakes up for a little bit, rolls over, yawns, rolls over, go back to sleep. And yet what happens when somebody in who is being dreamt by that force, when they wake up in their own dream and they begin to dream their own dream, that Vishnu's energy shift because there's an interchange, exchange of
00:13:54
Speaker
To me, it's excitement, it's desire, and then the frequencies are enhanced. And I know that showing up, as I have learned over these decades, how it was that a shaman on the Inca Trail saw me. Again, I've never been seen that way. Embarrassed, naked in some way.
00:14:20
Speaker
And yet I became the one that he had a vision to create this beautiful place in the jungle off the Amazon, a place called Yushin Taita, the place of the father. And I went to live in the jungle for a while with him. And I had my machete and every day the little compound grew larger and larger and Augustine became actually world famous. But I was a part of that initial part of that.
00:14:50
Speaker
helping another fulfill their vision. And that's my journey, whether it just came back from these seven weeks in Finland.
Rebirth and Aligning with Community
00:15:00
Speaker
And I find this a new level of responsibility, Catherine.
00:15:07
Speaker
I found back in Bermuda in early May after it was our 25th year of sweat lodge in Bermuda. And my adopted Lakota father, Wallace Black Elk, had come to Bermuda at my request those years ago. And I've carried on, grandpa's been gone some decades now, and carrying on these ways in the best way I could,
00:15:35
Speaker
And then I came to a realization after COVID, which was one of the greatest gifts of my life, that I could no longer even put any attention into healing or fixing. In Lakota, the unipi, the sweat lodge, that word translates into a place of rebirth.
00:16:02
Speaker
It awoke a responsibility in me to help. We were born as we were born. Whatever happened between our mothers and fathers, whatever the epigenetic influences, all of that, all of that, the more conscious and the more I learned to what really appeals to me, what doesn't appeal to me,
00:16:31
Speaker
that there's a refinement and a process of deciding going on. And then I get to re-conceive and rebirth myself. And as is being said in the world by a number of people, whether it's a Greg Braden or a Joe Dispenza or a Bruce Lifton, whatever, one cannot have a different future with the same personality that created it.
00:16:59
Speaker
And we had the necessity then, and it's also about learning about deliberate death. How to truly shed the old robes, that's the name called Earth robe. Our bodies are defense mechanisms. We basically were in defense. And when we no longer had need to be defended because there's no need to be attacked. The greater the opportunity,
00:17:31
Speaker
Well, my term is have a ball, as you know, Catherine. It's all about joy. Right. I find another level of responsibility has arisen, which I've watched people. I had people at the end of the lodge weekend in Bermuda. I had the individuals, he had a pile of lava in the middle of the room with a burning candle in it. And the 40 odd people were sitting around in a circle.
00:18:00
Speaker
And I had each one envision the new version, if they were given their ideal, just carte blanche, the ideal, how would you like to be December 31st, 2023? And I had them envision that future self standing there around the lava and looking at the fire.
00:18:25
Speaker
I never done this before, I never heard anybody doing it this way. And then I had them individually go up and step into that future self. Because that future self has a history that the current self does not have. The future self is breathing, standing, being in a way that the current self does not have. And another dear friend in the circle, someone I've known for decades, the energy shift in that room
00:18:56
Speaker
was so palpable, something happened that they engaged with the future self. And I believe in a way this affected what we call the whole field of consciousness.
Imagination and Visionary Potential
00:19:12
Speaker
What I learned also in that, Catherine, is that we all have to learn or develop a skillset of daily
00:19:26
Speaker
moving, imaginary, before we even get to the physical. Imagine the way open, the effortless way open, and dwell in the feeling state of that desire having been fulfilled. And we stay living in that desired feeling state.
00:19:46
Speaker
and learning to breathe into it, feel it, feel success, feel the new way of being, feel the new levels, how you see the world differently, how you know your own presence in the here and now, which is that we are impactors, we are influencers.
00:20:07
Speaker
I mean, it's amazing for me to think about. I think you've revealed a hidden thread in the book. So in Midnight Water, there are many stages of imagining. And I would say other people have used the term visionary, but using imagination and creativity
00:20:26
Speaker
to manifest something that hasn't yet existed. So for me, that happened many times. It happened through my children. My children manifested through mushroom experiences where literally something new was created that I could never have imagined. Changes in relationships, who I could be in relationship to different people.
00:20:48
Speaker
But it wasn't actually until the ceremony of that process was over that I could start living into my new life. And I think that's the most fascinating part is how long does a death take? Can it take 10 years? Can it take your whole life? How long versus how short? So if a person is in that process of change and you went through, you called it a flattening. I remember you told me you had been flattened.
00:21:16
Speaker
So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the time scale of transition and how maybe some of us get stuck as like waking zombies almost. You know, it's like we're dead already, but we can't just die and move on already. We're kind of waiting for some special thing to start that new life. Right. Lovely question. Thank you. And I don't have a pat answer for that.
00:21:42
Speaker
I would say I was so unconscious, I was so oblivious, because I was still boxed in by the Judeo-Christian world I was programmed into and that I had accepted so unconsciously. And then to be brought into, across the threshold, into a world of perpetual existence
00:22:10
Speaker
evolution and the way of the native people of Mexico, all these different traditions, there's a continuum, an ongoing process that's obviously moving, moving different ways. And the more, each time, for example, with an ayahuasca ceremony, well, if one is truly prepared, it's the vine of the soul and you learn to die to let go.
00:22:42
Speaker
It took a while for the roots of that to get into the barren, dry consciousness I was living out of.
Embracing Joy and Following Bliss
00:22:51
Speaker
To admit, this is the doorway opening of perception, that imagination, that sacred gift we all have, to imagine something differently.
00:23:06
Speaker
what was coming when you were speaking. It was in Karu, number one, the shaman in the jungle began to call me an Ultimassiah, which I didn't understand, but he named me as a visionary. He watched what I was bringing groups down, how I would prepare the group, what we would do in the process, et cetera, et cetera. And then it was the Karos
00:23:32
Speaker
after San Pedro ceremonies in the Andes and all, that they call me an ultimate Messiah, they said, well, you're a visionary. Well, I didn't know that. And then when it becomes really personal, we are all visionaries. We have not been gifted and acknowledged in that because that's a threat to the collective authority. We awaken in the dream and we're no longer at the affect of that.
00:24:01
Speaker
And I think I've learned along the way, I don't rebel against that because that which we fight against would become, there's certain layers of wisdom that have to be awakened. And then this aspect of the divine fool, the Dionysian one. And beloved Joe talked about one of his quotes that I love is, the world is a mess. It has always been a mess.
00:24:31
Speaker
you know, it has been a mess. And then he just said, follow your bliss. What gives your heart the greatest joy?
00:24:40
Speaker
And then I had an experience after a big ceremony. It was non plant-based ceremony. It was one of the ghost dance ceremonies I helped reawaken. And I was given in a very lucid dream following the ceremony, given the sword of Charlemagne, which had no context for. But then I find out, and I've been saying for a number of years, that happiness is of no interest to me.
00:25:10
Speaker
Joy, causeless joy. Well, it turns out the name of Charlemagne's sword is joyous. In French, it's joy. Wow. And how much more obvious can it be? And the unseen world, those worlds are with me right now. I've got goosebumps speaking to you. They're here. Those spirits are here. They're surrounding us. And at what moment then is another light going to go on in here?
00:25:40
Speaker
And what moment then the biggest perceptual shift, and the Northwest folks call that a glimmering, that with a little door, a little slot open, and a little light pours in. And I've received decades ago those instructions to head for that light, go on beyond, again, roomy.
00:25:59
Speaker
Eileen, I wonder if in that moment, the glimmering, I don't know if you could talk a little bit so that Charles is up to speed on something we mentioned in the last episode about the light you saw with your dad and how you showed me that same light in the mushroom ceremony in Manhattan. Do you think that that's similar?
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, again, that's why I use the word luminous a lot is when my dad would always speak about a light inside of us that guides us, and you either know or you don't know, and this light can just show you, right? And so when he died, all of a sudden, I noticed light in this new way, it's like light became something that would entrance me like, I have ordinary moments, I would just stare at like,
00:26:45
Speaker
light shining through drops of water or light shining through glass. And I would just stare at it. And I kept feeling that that was my dad reminding me of that luminosity, of that light, of that glimmer. When things I woke up through death, you know, when he died, all of a sudden, my senses woke up, my spiritual channels woke up in a way I had never experienced before. So to me, that was my first big death.
00:27:14
Speaker
transformation was the death of my father, but it came with this luminous awareness that's still carrying through into everything I do. Right. Charles, when Eileen and I had our mushroom experience in Manhattan, in the waning hours where in the Hopkins trials, we called it the afterglow. Well, isn't it interesting we were using the term glow?
00:27:43
Speaker
You know, there's a light. People have that light that is turned on. They can see it in everything. And I remember Eileen saying, like, let me show you something. And she kind of drew with her fingers in the air. And I saw this golden light appear.
00:27:57
Speaker
And I was like, Oh, is that what you've been trying to tell me about your dad and the light? And like we had this giggle fest about it, but you know, it doesn't have to be complicated. Like what other people call healing or release or letting go or resolution of grief. It can just be like in that single moment of seeing that golden light. And suddenly it's through your whole body. And Catherine, in my experience, that
00:28:27
Speaker
Shit, it's
Living in the Present Future
00:28:29
Speaker
spontaneous. It's there. And those other tracks, let them die. They're gone. Don't reattach. Don't reconnect to them. And that's a practice I've learned over these decades that I like to encourage others because it said most people live in the present past. Very few live in the present future.
00:28:54
Speaker
And the Hopi talked that about dragging dry bones along, dry story. What's his name? Clarice Estes. Hey, women who run with the wolves. They chew on these stories that there's no nourishment left. So then they have to create some drama to get pity or what have you. So then there's some more, something juicy, bloody to activate them. Wow. And yeah. And in the native way,
00:29:24
Speaker
When these portals open and they've opened for me, I know that as I've gone through these portals, that's created a wake. Because as I've gone through that, others can flow through it. In the native way, you're told to come back. And can you receive that vision from existence, from spirit? That's either something that's personally for you and or it's for your community.
00:29:52
Speaker
So you bring that transformed self back into the community and the community, the village, the community benefits from it. And then the community vibration, I want to get this vibrational sequence in here. The baseline of the community vibration is upgraded. It's released from an old stagnant story, an old held trauma or what have you, a gestalt.
00:30:20
Speaker
and the potential of, in the native way we talked about, a liberation of our ancestors. The whole field has the potential of being liberated.
00:30:32
Speaker
And Eileen, when you were speaking about your dad and that room of this experience there, well, that touches me deeply from my experience. And then how to, in that recapitulation process, that was a gift, that golden light's a gift. It carries so much more than beyond the personal memory. And how to feed that, the more I give that attention to that, and I breathe into that light.
00:31:03
Speaker
There's something that's receptive. What I give my attention to, it amplifies, it opens, it reveals more of itself. The implicate becomes explicate. And I've learned over these decades, back when I was teaching again, there comes a point, and maybe this is a building fear or become afraid of it along the way in culture, but there comes a point as something begins to expand and expand and expand.
00:31:34
Speaker
There is that place of death where I can no longer be who I am. Because I've done this with groups for decades. Get to a point of deliberate expansion, opening, and the next breath will be a dissolution of the old identity. And there is always going to be something, and it can be so spontaneous, Catherine. As you were asking that question earlier, how long does it take?
00:32:02
Speaker
in the world of mind, there is no time. It's timeless. And we enter into the eternal and the timeless. And that which, again, that which is always waiting. Always waiting to be engaged with. And then I had an experience, I went in Bermuda, had we had been able to
00:32:31
Speaker
have sensors in the vibration of that room. Those sensors would have been wildly fluctuating because this energy was not the same. Happened again in Finland on the new moon in August the 16th. I had never had a assembly like that happen with that intensity. I'm just hollow-boned for it. But it's my responsibility to be an open vessel.
00:32:58
Speaker
And I think it's unusual for people in this day and age to be met with that level of intentionality and attention. So they think, oh, I'm just going for this thing. Something might happen. Who knows? Maybe I'll learn something. Maybe I'll hear some interesting passage from a book. Maybe I'll hear some interesting music. And then suddenly they sit down.
00:33:23
Speaker
And they're confronted with not just what we're offering, but they're confronted with themselves. And how many people in that circle said, I can't believe that took me straight to the heart of this old issue I had with my mother when she died 20 years ago. And it's like all of a sudden these doors were opening for everyone.
00:33:44
Speaker
But that was not because we sat down and said, how are we going to open up everybody's doors today? No, we said, how are we going to show up and what do we want out of this? And then that allowed, it gave permission to everyone else to show up in that same open way. It's so rare. People don't get this anymore. I mean, this is what's truly like the sickness of our society. People have forgotten how to sit in a circle and open.
00:34:15
Speaker
Well, and also bring again, you know, our feelings are intelligent.
Awareness in Relational Spaces
00:34:20
Speaker
Awareness is this magnifying glass to expand all these relational spaces between, again, with ourselves and with our grievances, with our desires, with our future. It's all fueled through our consciousness as well, you know, and that's why it's important to have these circles where we can look at it
00:34:43
Speaker
be with it and allow it to teach us continually. You know, it's always teaching, as you were mentioning, Charles, and I still find it completely fascinating that we have a consciousness and awareness. It's endlessly inspirational to me. Me too.
00:35:26
Speaker
So, Charles, I have a, I don't know, maybe a question that's relevant to some listeners. I think sometimes the blissful, joyful, playful spaces that the three of us get to participate in on a regular basis seem
00:35:45
Speaker
kind of rarified or like, oh, well, you know, those lucky people, they get to do that fun stuff, but I have to work. I have to do this. It's all of this kind of obligation and stress and illness or trauma. And so I wonder if you could speak to the reality that a lot of listeners are in, which is that maybe that the perception of the burden of your life is itself
00:36:12
Speaker
illusory, you know, there is the real burden of your life, the things that you do day to day and you've lived a very hard life at different points in your past. So, um, you know, if someone is kind of on that precipice, you know, how do we, how do we speak to the skepticism, the skeptical mind that says, Oh, there's no way I could have that much joy. I have all this work to do. I have this past. I have this burden to carry. That's a, that's a, I'm with all your studies here. Tough question.
00:36:41
Speaker
But it's also a careful question to respond to.
00:36:46
Speaker
What we see happening in, especially in this terrain, this Turtle Island, where you and I live, Catherine, are in habit. I'm not sure how many people are living because there's so many questions come to mind here. How many people are really even alive? Roomie asked that question. Others have asked that question. How many people are even aware of their
00:37:15
Speaker
being robotic, they're addicted to certain, the addictions run deep in us. We're addicted to drama, we're addicted to pain, we're addicted to this and that. And until we can begin to really question, and I believe that skeptic's gotta be sat down with, and I love the skeptic, you know? Because once I've examined something and
00:37:43
Speaker
I see through it, I see the stranglehold in it, what have you. I begin to realize, no, I have internalized all of this, which is somebody else's lies, their reality.
00:38:00
Speaker
The more I question how there was times when I asked people to, in Bermuda, think about seven months ahead from now. Well, a lot of folks have never been asked that in their lives. Of course, again, the listener, there's folks out there, God knows how many will listen to this and their skeptic will rise.
00:38:24
Speaker
but there is already a reason why they're watching this program, why this interview, there's something there that has drawn that to that. And that something in them is what I'm depending on saying, yeah, there's something more, there's something more about me within me that is not what I've been told, not what I've been taught to believe.
00:38:50
Speaker
And there are enough, I think, this whole realm, yet I did not know about these sacraments. And yet I know I've become a guardian for the sacred, the protect that I am passionate about. There's a level of, when I say it's skepticism, and it's a carefulness approaching with great, great care.
00:39:20
Speaker
And Jo talked about the guarding at the gate. And I know, Catherine, from your experience, your years, your dedication, carefulness, specificity is so important. We learned along in that therapeutic world, we were reactivating trauma without even recognizing it, right?
00:39:47
Speaker
And then, so what does it mean? So rather than reactivating then, I had to take people out of that gestalt, that whole wiring of network. I did that with Vietnam veterans decades ago. And then being able to ask the unasked question, ask a question nobody else has asked them. And that also opens a door to response from inside. And that's where a glimmering can happen.
00:40:19
Speaker
Does that help a little? Because that's an interesting question. Yeah. I'm kind of remembering versions of myself along the path. And when things started,
00:40:35
Speaker
really shifting for me. I was allegedly at my dream job, you know, at Johns Hopkins, studying psychedelics on the faculty, getting grants, you know,
Questioning Societal Narratives
00:40:46
Speaker
very prestigious. You have long CVs, you add papers and papers every year, you get more and more money, yada, yada, yada. And I met a Zen teacher who just kind of gave me a question to ask myself and everything blew up.
00:40:59
Speaker
And the interesting thing that happened was the experience I had following the dissolution was terrifying because I didn't have any way to reflect it in my culture. I didn't have wise elders to tell me, you know, hey, this is normal. It's lovely. It's blissful. You're along for the ride. You've already jumped, so stop worrying about how high it was.
00:41:22
Speaker
And instead, I had people saying like, oh, it's anxiety. Maybe it's psychosis. Oh, you should be very worried if it's psychosis because then you'll never get better. And look, you've already damaged your brain. You know, these stories that we tell people to keep them enslaved to the past version of themselves. And it's relevant to psychedelics because this is going to start happening to a lot of people who don't know it's coming.
00:41:47
Speaker
People are going to be shoved through that threshold, and then they're going to be in a room with people who don't know what's on the other side of the threshold. So folks like us are going to be the safety net. We're going to catch people as they're flying through the threshold, saying, what just happened? I signed up for a depression trial. Now I'm here, talking about dreams.
00:42:07
Speaker
And it's also widening, you know, this sense of like, you're all of a sudden widening what you think life is, you know, we get so boxed into what we think life is. And I do I think these questions, these, these riddles that come along and pierce into those bubbles are that they're just like, no, you there's an ocean of being not just this kind of small little space that you've been swimming in.
00:42:33
Speaker
But certainly, I mean, certainly I think our culture will use fear tactics
00:42:40
Speaker
mental health tactics, trauma tactics, all sorts of tactics to keep people just on this side of the threshold. Like, oh, sorry, you went a little too far. That's not where we want you to go. We just want you to feel a little less anxious and get back to work. You know, so it's interesting that you see the powers that be trying to keep people just on this side of enlightenment. And you and I know, we all know that once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
00:43:10
Speaker
And so the process will, the process will happen. It's unavoidable, but I think there could be some, some casualties, perceived casualties when people are told there's something that happened that's wrong with them and that they should try to fix it, you know, reel it back. Right. Well, that brings up a very important story for me, Catherine, of something that happened decades ago, when again, all these doors of perception were opening
00:43:40
Speaker
within me. The name Milton Erickson, he was a great hypnotist out in Arizona, fabled hypnotist and all. And somehow I re-tapped onto Milton's way of working. It was just inherent within me. So I suddenly gained a reputation in New York City for working with schizophrenics, because I had this door open. And then somebody came to check me out.
00:44:09
Speaker
And then I tried to explain to her what I was doing and gave her the experience. And this woman who was so rigid in her model of therapy and her education and perpetuating reinforcing the illness of the complex of psychology, I did something which happened spontaneously. And a voice spoke out of this woman that she terrified her. A voice spoke to me.
00:44:40
Speaker
and identified things with terrified me because I never did it with a threshold.
00:44:47
Speaker
Out of that then came a story of eventually a brother who was quite, the whole family was quite famous in the UK. One of her sisters had received several, like the Pulitzer Prizes in America. Brothers of the lead violinist in the London Symphony Orchestra for years. I became a mesh in that family. And one of the brothers who had been medicated by the,
00:45:15
Speaker
world, psychological world, 35 years, a drug addict in the corner of the world. And we broke him within two months of steady work in New York, so five days a week, three or four hours a day. We broke a pattern of addiction. And when he went back to the UK later, they wanted to remedicate him.
00:45:37
Speaker
because they don't want you to really be free and free spirit, to be that little child again, you know, that joy, that joy is Dionysian, it's multidimensional. Recently I was interviewed by a group here in the States and this man had heard of me and he also knew Wallace Black Elk. And this therapist, I wouldn't dare name his name because he's written seven or eight psychology books here in America.
00:46:06
Speaker
And at one point, he said to me that in his entire life, he had never met anybody who's so spontaneous. Well, I am, I just go with it. And then at one moment, I asked, I never met this guy in my life, just wrote a Zoom cast. I said, well, when was the last time you sang? And he just started to look on his face and he said, well, I don't, because with that old story, the little kid, he was told to mouth the words, not sing.
00:46:34
Speaker
And here is a guy who recognized psychologist. He's still carrying that room from childhood. What the fuck is this? What are we doing, you know? I mean, I'm sure many people listening will have heard many other podcasts talk about trauma. We don't have to talk about it, but it is a story you carry and you carry it until you don't want to carry it anymore. And we forget that it's our choice to put it down.
00:47:04
Speaker
And at least two thirds, I think, of what I tried to do with Midnight Water was to demonstrate a real world example of what does it look like to realize you're carrying a burden, realize it's a story, tell the story, put the burden down, and then start your life.
00:47:21
Speaker
I wish I had figured it out faster. I wish I had figured it out right away when I was 20 years old, but I didn't. And I think, in a way, it doesn't matter when you get there, but when you realize it, then stop. Just stop. It's like an addiction. I don't feel bad for anyone who feels like they need a certain medicine or chemical to get through the day.
00:47:46
Speaker
But if a moment comes along where you realize that that hook is causing so much pain and suffering and you don't need it in you anymore and you take it out, you put it down and you move on with your life, it can happen, like you said, spontaneously. It can happen in a moment.
00:48:02
Speaker
And, but the, the amount of time through which you're unconscious of it even being the thing that you're carrying or that you're hooked to can be a lifetime. And Captain in the, in the Roy indigenous world, it's so different than the white ticky tacky box of Islam, Judeo Christianity. In that world of the medicine, trauma is initiation. It's not to be fixed.
00:48:31
Speaker
I have been witness in the smokehouse in Canada that would make some people wanted to run away when they saw these things happening. I have known the world of magic that just blew the circus in my Judeo-Christian mind because I was thrown out of the box. I got kicked out of that kettle. And by really understanding that that trauma is medicine,
00:48:57
Speaker
and then watching what these indigenous cultures have done with that for eons.
Transforming Trauma into Liberation
00:49:04
Speaker
You know, I can give you the story of Melodoma Somme, but I can show you Credo Mutua, who I was sent to out of a hospital bed in New York City back in 2001. The universe is here, waiting. I'm sent
00:49:22
Speaker
carrying some stuff from America to this fabled Sangoma in South Africa. And the universe gave me a little tiny arrowhead or spearhead. This man had been crying for a decade to fight AIDS in Africa. I feel, what am I? I'm a deliverer. I bring things that are cried for. And that place again of staying with the trauma.
00:49:51
Speaker
It's death and rebirth. And giving birth to what? And that's my whole, been my whole thing around therapies. They're trying to have you what? Heal you? So what does it mean to be healed? Get back on the ticky tacky box? Get back on the treadmill? No way, Jose.
00:50:13
Speaker
It also strikes me that I don't know if you identify with this role or term, but you strike me as a kind of a doula.
00:50:24
Speaker
both birth and death. And at least personally, what I have witnessed you bringing to my own path, my own ceremonies, I mean, you taught me how to create a spirit feast for my dad, to prepare his final meal, to burn his clothes, to say everything I needed to say to him. That happened
00:50:47
Speaker
what, six months after he died? I mean, thank God you taught me that. Thank God you could hold the space for that and the fire. Because otherwise, I would have been continuing to carry the burden. The man is dead and I'm still carrying him around. But no, you said no. You sent him on his way. You wish him a good journey. He'll know what to do. It's okay. And so this idea of
00:51:11
Speaker
helping the person either give birth to or give death to the thing that needs to be born, that needs to die. We're all trying to do it ourselves. So then we go to doctors and therapists. Well, they're not doulas. They don't know what they're doing. They're trying to help with what they know. But someone like you is trained to help that process produce something. Right. Thank you. Something new. Well, as you know, when I came after I've been hit by lightning those first two times,
00:51:38
Speaker
And in the jib away in the Lakota people with in recognizing the color of it. Well, I have death medicine and Grandpa when I came up my vision quest up in the Rockies for days He walked me down these trails in the mountains there and he said but Charlie there are no textbooks on death and dying you're gonna have to learn how
00:52:02
Speaker
And it was scary, Catherine, at first. I had people that I'd worked with who'd been as children in Auschwitz or Belsen, survivors of the concentration camps. Even the point of when I was driven out of a hospital in New York City, because this woman who was dying wanted to see me. I hadn't seen her for 10 years, maybe. And I climbed up in her bed. I was holding her body when the head nurse comes in. But she was dead within a few hours after that.
00:52:30
Speaker
And then my body, this body became a vessel for spirits leaving. And that's initiation. And also with the initiation comes the endurance for greater and greater life force to move through. And in that place, I would say it's the threshold of death and rebirth. Liberation, it's liberation.
00:52:58
Speaker
to what's beyond all of this, whatever it is. And Eileen, I wonder, I wonder you too, do you, you know, we talked about this a little bit in the last episode about how you were called into that death practice with your dad. I don't know how you identify now. Do you feel like it was just something, not just, but it was something that you did with your father?
00:53:23
Speaker
for some particular karmic or cosmic reason or do you feel that that is something that was left with you as an ability to be with the dying or do you think that it's just something that comes and goes for you?
00:53:37
Speaker
I mean, I definitely think my dad's death initiated me into, I suppose it's sort of death practice or transformation space. And I discovered the part of me that intuitively also knew how to navigate it. I mean, like there was loads of mistakes made in the process, but there is a part of you that just kind of knows that there's a part of you that wakes up to that space of, if it's a spirit leaving the body, you just were built with it.
00:54:05
Speaker
And for me, because it was my dad, I wanted the best. And I think my love for him is what also ignited it, because I was committed to be his death doula in a sense. I was going to be there by his side, no matter what was going to happen. And I noticed that as soon as I made the commitment to be there with him in this transition, my own gnosis of this death space woke up.
00:54:48
Speaker
It just wakes so much up. I would not have the sense of gratefulness or all the things that to me are potent in this life now are because I felt death, like I walked through death's door with my dad and it gave me a whole new perspective on the world.
00:54:53
Speaker
Wow, yeah, totally Eileen.
00:55:09
Speaker
And it altered your mind. I mean, I've spoken about this loads of times, and we have. It's also a space where your consciousness is altered. Like I felt like I've been giving a drug sometimes, you know, I had no idea about altered states when dad died. But I was very altered. And again,
00:55:28
Speaker
I'm glad I didn't go to a doctor to tell the doctor I was feeling altered or that I was hearing voices or that there was this new voice that was appearing in my head. I'm just glad I didn't go and tell the doctor who knows where I would have ended up. Now that's one of the most valuable voices I have is the one that woke up during a tragedy.
00:55:52
Speaker
Could you, I mean, I can't imagine if I had never taken psychedelics before my sister's deathbed. I mean, it was a wide awake what people, you know, they're
00:56:04
Speaker
There are these people doing extended state DMT trials in London, Eileen. We have a mutual friend who wrote about this. And now there's a meet the entities. It's like a whole encyclopedia of all the entities you meet in DMT world. And I said, well, I met one sober in a hospital room. It's like, you don't have to take DMT to meet these entities. They're all around. Right on. Right around, yeah.
00:56:45
Speaker
So Charles, I wonder if in our final 10, 15 minutes together, I know we're approaching the hour mark, but we have so much territory that we could choose to go down. I think the burning question for a lot of people is probably, since you have seen so much transformation,
00:57:07
Speaker
If someone is approaching an illness or the end of life, either for themselves or a family member, they're going to start hearing this suggestion from doctors, oh, try psilocybin, try MDMA, try this, try that. And so I wonder if you could help people
00:57:24
Speaker
Think about that future decision and imagine into what kind of death experience do you want and how are you going to answer when medical authority figures tell you, well, there was a scientific study of psilocybin for the end of life and it will decrease your anxiety and help you believe in heaven again. We're going to start getting the propaganda around this. It's going to be in the mainstream.
00:57:49
Speaker
Well, in my own case, I have now for a number of years, I believe in deliberate death and becoming more and more a vocal advocate for that in the world. And we learned from the Tibetan way that Tibetans prepare for death. I've been imagining my last 10 breaths for about three or four years now and practicing that last breath.
00:58:19
Speaker
And Eileen, when you said tragedy about your father's death, what the hell? Why make it a tragedy? That's what our Western minds do. It's an inevitable threshold. I found resistance. I found all parts of myself resisting, rehearsing the last 10 breaths.
00:58:44
Speaker
And there's one of the metaphors, I've watched the doctor's name, Northrop, I think, or Christine Northrop, who talked about happy, happy, healthy, happy, healthy, dead.
00:58:56
Speaker
shut the light switch off. But we learned to do that. It's a voluntary control. I go back to Jack Schwartz's work decades ago, the concentration camps and all. Voluntary controls, we can learn to react, activate that or access it in our own nervous systems. And we're no longer at the apt act of externals.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yes, there is a rush already. It's not going to be a rush talking about doctors because they're ill-equipped. They're ill-equipped. They've not been taught. They're ticky-tacky people in those little boxes. They want to reinforce themselves. They want to know. And I'm not judging them, but that's all they know is to spin around in a little whirlpool.
00:59:41
Speaker
We've got to be those ones, Catherine, who, when they're spinning out of that eddy, help them out of the eddy and into that heartline of the river, which all rivers have a heartline, and they're moving in flow, a state of flow. And in my experience, I have many dozens of people tell me they feel suddenly inside, something inside of them,
01:00:07
Speaker
feels assured, confirmed, recognized by whatever I'm saying, whatever is coming out of me. And then my responsibility is to have them keep flowing in that way. How do you keep reinforcing the yes in yourself? And yes, those voices are gonna come up.
01:00:25
Speaker
But the flowing river flows around rocks.
Aligning with Universal Flow
01:00:29
Speaker
It doesn't push the other way. Just flow around it. And to me, the intuitive factor comes in here. I could sense you, Eileen, my sensing here, how this intuition is really activating you, the voices, the whole of the guided system. It's different. You've been initiated.
01:00:48
Speaker
And who's, do you see yourself differently? Do you honor yourself in a new light? Oh, 100%. And that old Eileen, whatever she was. Yeah. And is there pride there? Is there joy there? You stand differently. You're a guardian, you know? You're a threshold keeper. And walk in that power in the world.
01:01:13
Speaker
I've been with fellows who, you know, traditional sun dancers. And I hear those elders say that you've got to walk differently in the world. I've been in the smokehouse for decades. There comes a point in your life when you can no longer handle even your cooking utensils in the way you were before. This new identity has replaced the old identity.
01:01:40
Speaker
And I've learned tools to do this to show you, to guide people into replacement thinking and replace this, rearrange that. And it's no big deal. It takes some careful attention and sorting, and it's the same way I go into any kind of ceremony.
01:02:04
Speaker
Because there's something we are working with, something that's present that is so profound, so unknowable in some ways. But to me, it's that aligning with... Because I find myself so hungry for more.
01:02:28
Speaker
My death is well, well practiced. I'm coming to the end. I feel myself coming closer and closer. I'm no longer accepting any engagements out there in the future. Cause I want to go into this empty well and find out there's anything left after this amazing speckled journey and what have you, but something that triggers me to get up every morning in a state of anticipation and more joy, more learning, more engagement.
01:03:00
Speaker
If we could just learn to practice our final 10 breaths, that's it. And yet, how do you do that? So the way that you have lived your life is what allows you to take that time now with deliberation to practice those 10 breaths. But now we have all these people hearing potentially the possibility of doing it now while they're young people, while they don't need to worry.
01:03:27
Speaker
Never too soon to start. Other cultures do it. This fucking Judeo-Christian culture, with the plug up their butts and all of that, they're just dregs. We're seeing it. We're seeing it in the world. It's all collapsing. I just had an image of all of us taking plug site people, you know, we're just maybe just... Yeah, plug out.
01:04:00
Speaker
And it's all a divine comedy. Somewhere in this all, there's a huge laugh throughout existence. The huge laugh. That is something that someone said that Eileen, you know that
01:04:16
Speaker
Was it in London? I forget. Someone said that they're like, wow, for such a somber topic, you bring a lot of humor to these really tough topics. I was like, well, why not? How else are you going to do it? I don't know any other way. Yeah. Death better be funny. If it's not funny, I don't want to show up for it. That's right. But again, a culture is built, a religion is built on fear.
01:04:45
Speaker
It's so, you know, I'm not the only one talking about this right now. I'm hearing other voices suddenly. People are getting on the bandwagon. Pull the plug on the dominant patriarchal culture. Pull the plugs out of this and that. And let it just go spinning off into evaporation. And have no loyalty to anything else but one's deepest spirit. You talk about that glowing light within you, Eileen.
01:05:16
Speaker
The natives talk about that. Spirit's in there. It's not out there anywhere. It's in here. And give full attention to that and have a ball. There's joy. There's gotta be joy.
01:05:30
Speaker
Right, and my current practice has now become waking up and just sensing that awareness, that light that sees things, that feels things. Just the pure sense of being alive has now, again, to me become the most fascinating thing. The fact that I'm a sentient being that has this light, that has this awareness and that can engage with life in that way. And also not forgetting, we are the storytellers. Each of us is a storyteller, you know?
01:06:02
Speaker
And the original storyteller was a shaman weaving the magic and mystery, moving the energies here and there, and then leaving people. And we learned to be then really outrageous storytellers, not just cycle babbling the culture's language, but entrancing everyone in the circle, whatever, in the audience, and then suddenly just drop them
01:06:33
Speaker
into the now space. I found myself, they did a concert. It was a concert I knew about in Finland in the community, but they wanted to feature a number of the songs and they turned me loose to sing some of my songs. And I had not sung with a band for me 45 years. The last time I did an off-off Broadway show or Broadway show,
01:06:56
Speaker
And I just used the drum all these years and all. And then suddenly with an orchestra backup, these songs took on a whole new meaning like return to the earth. Let's go home. Let's go home. Return. And that essential return for all of us, you know, going back. The recapitulation that a lot of this journey entails.
01:07:20
Speaker
And, whoa, I woke up like I had been awakened in a long time. You know? Yeah. And now my question is, okay, how do I keep opening up? Because this, I'm a born singer in my heart. All of our hearts are born to sing. Not just the names up there in the big stages. No. We're all meant to sing our own song. Dance our own dance. Because we're all unique individuals. I've learned this from the indigenous people.
01:07:50
Speaker
when I got out of the ticky tacky white box, you know? Got into the world of the numinous, the world of magic. And it's right there. This is the other beautiful thing again. It's right here. There's no having to travel anywhere. I mean, once you, yeah, it's here and it's just again, waking up your sense of your storyteller, your awareness to just pick it up.
01:08:18
Speaker
Again, we do need teachers and mentors for that, you know, unless you go through, like I said, an initiation like the ones that Catherine and I went where we just we had undeniable experiences to teach us this. So again, if people don't necessarily have a mentor or a teacher know that whatever
01:08:36
Speaker
whatever initiation, whatever hardship you think you're going through, it's literally trying to wake up more magic. And if you don't see that, then you go down the route of kind of inserting the butt plug even harder up your own metaphor. Sorry. Well, but you're saying here, Eileen too, and Catherine, those people who are listening now, they cannot go back.
01:09:06
Speaker
They've taken something in from this broadcast. They're gonna question more. And there's always gonna be, if you really put that question out to the universe, that was taught decades ago, to go out and talk to the trees, talk to the universe, and then watch what shows up. That happened up in the Arctic Circle recently. And I was aware then suddenly of hungry ghosts all in the field.
01:09:31
Speaker
and thousands of Sami who were killed by the Christian missionaries, and the Nazis who had come in there and slaughtered women and children. There were hungry ghosts all in the forest there. And then within minutes, the ceremony that releases that. And once you, you and Catherine, we can't go back, honey. We cannot go back. You gotta keep moving forward. And the doors,
01:10:02
Speaker
What is it? That endemic or that peeling inside, the tropism, wants to open wider and wider. Breathing deeper and deeper.
Being a Purposeful Rebel
01:10:14
Speaker
Because that's where joy is. That's where aliveness is. We become rebels. We surely are rebels.
01:10:23
Speaker
That's for sure, Charles. I think if I wanted to prove anything with my book is that every single person can be the rebel in their own life. Yes. But not a rebel without a purpose. It's easy to just rebel without any clear idea of what or why or how. What's the intention here? Figure out your intention and then direct that rebellious spirit. Well, Catherine, thank you because I was speaking to a young father this morning.
01:10:52
Speaker
I married this couple six, seven years ago and they have two little boys and they've learned again this whole level of what kind of justice. We have this old story of justice and punishment, this and that. Rather than listening to the little child, listening to what it is, they're rebelling and then their story gets to be told. They need to be acknowledged because they're crying out. This doesn't fit me.
01:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, there's rebellion, but we gotta listen to this, the rebelor. And there's a role in that also, rebelling against the dominant culture. And we know we see the patriarchy, talk about plugged up, you know, dying in the world, but it's fighting like hell to maintain its dominance with destroying the earth, what's ever happening here and there. And people just being ground up
01:11:50
Speaker
Like in a meat grinder, humans are. They don't care anymore. Well, now, I mean, they'll just sprinkle a little MDMA into the sauce. That's somehow going to make us feel better being ground up to nothing by this machine. It's like, no, it's not going to work. Not going to work. You know, and I think something, Eileen, that you've learned too, right, is that because you were awakening people to some of these medicines.
01:12:16
Speaker
But you were encouraging them to seek in their own life the way they needed it. Like, don't go to a therapist or go to an underground guide and think you need to have someone else tell you what's wrong with you. You know, Eileen, I remember you kind of inspiring people, like, ask yourself, like, you know, what am I going to learn about myself through this? Yeah. And to me also, Catherine,
01:12:43
Speaker
Is there something, those are all threshold places, all thresholds. And what is waiting to show itself to me? Whether from within or without, there's something waiting, always. That which is always waiting. And a lot of, me in my own world, so under educated by the system. And the laws about not looking here, not looking there, you gotta do this and that, no.
01:13:13
Speaker
We don't look everywhere, look everywhere. And there's more life waiting, there's more joy waiting, there's more experience waiting. Life is always life thing and each of us is here to, you know, become the duelers of the old world. Like, you know, it's kind of like trying, it's taking its last breaths and we just have to say, it's okay, you can go, you know.
01:13:42
Speaker
thank you for what you've done and you know but you can go now and that's been another lesson of all these death initiations is then spotting things when they're just ready to go they just need to go and be the doula who's having a ball yeah total joy no morbidity the dancing doula yeah the dancing doula let's do dancing doulas yeah
01:14:09
Speaker
and call in the archetypes, call in those archetypes, those spirits, the diamonds, the woes dancing on the carnal ground.
01:14:27
Speaker
Maybe that's who we are, Charles. We're the dancing demons of the chartograph. No, they're diamonds. They're not demons. They're diamonds. Diamonds. The dancing diamonds. Tell me the difference. And for listeners who don't know the difference either. Well, the so-called demon is the so-called negative force, but the diamond is the god. The exalted.
01:14:52
Speaker
I had never heard that. I've never heard that before. See, I learned something just now. Yeah, the Daimon. Look at those old tankas. Look at those old paintings, you know. I just learned recently about the laments, the old tradition, lamenting. They're being able to really wail and grieve properly. Well, they're meant to take you to ecstasy. They're not meant to keep you caught in the grief. They push through, push and ecstatic.
01:15:22
Speaker
comes through. That was the wisdom and the old lament traditions. Wow. I mean, it's the same with birth, right? You're pushing, it's kind of contractful, painful, and then your birth, and then it's like, ha, the breath and life comes in.
01:15:39
Speaker
Listeners will be hearing this conversation as we enter into the liminal space of the popular celebrations of death like Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, All Souls' Day, Dia de los Muertos. So this is the time of year that people will be hearing this conversation. And so I wonder just to kind of
01:16:02
Speaker
offer a final offering or intention around folks who are bringing some fun and frivolity, but also remembrance to those who have died, our ancestors, and maybe even a way that we can tap into that through our dreams to tie it back to a theme that has been kind of weaving throughout this whole conversation.
01:16:26
Speaker
I will go first because my dad came to me in a dream on the night that was actually the anniversary of the vigil that I had with his body. And he saw me through a chain link fence and I was waiting to get into some event. And he said, oh, oh, Kath, I've been waiting to get a hold of you all summer. Just wait a second. And he kind of started going around the long way. And I was like, no, no, no, we're not going back to that. And I just took off.
01:16:54
Speaker
And you know, part of me, and then there were many other versions of him kind of showing up and trying to get my attention and be like either closing a door saying like, No, the past is the past. And then when I woke up, I felt a little bit bad about it. I said, Oh, maybe he had something interesting to tell me. So now I'm kind of sitting with the balance of that.
01:17:12
Speaker
that that door has closed. And also, what does it look like for me to be open to him as an ancestor with maybe something to tell me? He just can't show up in a different way yet. So I get confused by the form. So that's kind of my little, there's not a teaching there, it's more of a question. When our dead ancestors show up, maybe with a new revelation, how do we remember to see them in a way that they're not who they were? Yeah, yeah. What about you, Aline?
01:17:43
Speaker
Oh, in terms of this kind of threshold. Well, for me, it's just I, you know, my dad was to me, my biggest guide and mentor and spiritual companion really and continues to be so I, you know, I really treasure those that I love that have passed on as my guides and I tend to
01:18:03
Speaker
continually keep asking them for support and guidance. So that's what I do around this time. Also happens, yeah, that my nephew was born around that time as well. So I'll be I'll be looking at kind of this, this new, this new earth, this new earth energy that's come through him as well and into our lives. Because he's been the biggest thing that's happened since my, our
01:18:27
Speaker
that died 15 years ago, then Atlas was born and he's now this new big energy that's come through. Wow. Well, for me, number one, Catherine, I have personalized, it's a Jungian way of suggestion, personalized the part of me that weaves my dreams. I have a dialogue.
01:18:54
Speaker
with my Dreamweaver, D.W.'s name, Mitchell's. And I have instructed him because again, we're all culturally entrained around drama and fear. And my Dreamweaver knows that I'm not interested in any of that. And what I'm interested in most, because I love musical dreams, I love dreams of celebration, da, da, da. So even this morning and the wee hours, I've gone through amazing hours of dreams
01:19:23
Speaker
And traditionally, I think of my Icelandic people, other traditions, this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere and you know, things are dying. And we're coming to that end of the growing season. The Hopi, other people, agrarian people have so treasured this time and I've learned so much from them.
01:19:47
Speaker
So to take this time that bails your thin, et cetera, to ceremonialize it, and yeah, Halloween's turned into a big commercial thing now. But back in the history of this, there was a time of really honoring death in a good way and planting the seeds for the future. I could go on for a long time with all these lessons from the different nations.
01:20:14
Speaker
We've all had a human experience with all those people who were influencers to us. Some had more consciousness than others. And it's a time for me to review, to appreciate in more ways and highlight it, enjoy it.
01:20:36
Speaker
My community in Finland, they've never done this, but they're already planning on all this, a celebration like they've never had before from the Karelia tradition, not going the cliche Halloween way, but there are indigenous roots to Halloween. What they did were the old pumpkins in the Celtic tradition and all. And I love, I've been in the cemeteries in Mexico,
01:21:03
Speaker
and go from family to family because they didn't sit down invited to drink and what have you and be a part of the celebration over that grave, wandering through the graves at night. Oh, it's awesome. It's awesome.
01:21:20
Speaker
Well, thank you, Charles, and thank you, Eileen. It was so fun. I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg. We could have a three-day conversation and record the whole thing nonstop. I look forward to a day where maybe the three of us can be together, in person, in human flesh. Eileen was close. Charles and I have been in Bermuda a few times together, but it would be amazing, the three of us together.
01:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, just encouraging listeners to really dive into. Charles has been interviewed and has offerings all over the world. As he said, he is leaving his schedule open so that he can enjoy more and more joy and spontaneity. But if you have the chance to cross pass with him, it's a truly life-changing, momentous opportunity. And Charles, thank you so much for showing up in my life when you did.
01:22:16
Speaker
continuing to show up in my life. And I hope that I can also bring more joy into yours. You do and you will. I love you both. Big hugs. Thank you, Charles.
01:22:30
Speaker
And we'll see how this is received. I look forward to your hear of how this is received by the listeners. She'll get feedback. Yes. Yeah. And also, I think we need to record more of Charles. I have got a million questions after this.
01:22:51
Speaker
So thank you everyone for listening. This has been another episode of Dialogues in the Labyrinth. As you can tell, we have had a lot of fun today playing in the Labyrinth, finding all of the different tracks through the maze.
01:23:06
Speaker
and very grateful to our guest, Charles Lawrence. This is myself, Katherine McLean, and Eileen Hall as your hosts. And you can dive into some more of this material in Midnight Water and hopefully many, many more books that the rest of us will create and art that we will offer to you to invite you into active participation and engagement in your own life and the greater mystery around it.
01:23:37
Speaker
No.
01:23:56
Speaker
you